Phonetic Principles in The Formation and Nomination of Trade Names

Abstract

This article analyzes the importance of the phonetic principle for the formation and nomination of the food product name and trademark with a material on Uzbek language. It employs contemporary theories of pragmatonymy and chrematonomastics to iteratively examine the phonetic properties of food brand names on sound structure, audibility, tempo and phono-semantic congruence The research underscores the role of sound symbolism, analyzing occurrences of assonance and dissonance in  influencing the memorability of brands and how they are perceived by potential buyers. One gap in knowledge this article addresses is the few studies on phonetics of food brand names in the Uzbek language, whereas, quite the opposite exists regarding English food  brands. This article does a great job covering the main phonetic principles for successful naming involving pronunciation ease, stress, and sound symbolism. This article is methodologically descriptive-analytical, structural-linguistic and quantitative in its analysis of more than 150 food brand names in the Republic of Uzbekistan. These findings suggest that brand names that follow  certain phonetic shapes and sounds to help better align to consumers and increase brand recognition. The above study is significant to consumer behavior literature because it combines the previously unconnected fields of phonetics and consumer psychology/culture. It also generates several implications for marketers and linguists. For marketers, the study can inform better  branding strategies and ways of creating more impactful brand names on the Uzbek market. For linguists, the main implication is that not all phonetic principles have universal psycholinguistic effects: thus, more research is needed on the constructs’ cross-linguistic comparison and the impact of phonetic principles on global brand perception.